


Too Many Lonely Lines to Read Between

by TehChouHenshins (TehChou)



Category: Kamen Rider W (Double)
Genre: Gen, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:42:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehChou/pseuds/TehChouHenshins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He learns what it is to be a man in the books his fathers leaves open in the study; books on science and history and names in lists that repeat endlessly and grow by numbers, adding into a definition and a whole that he keeps buzzing under his skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Many Lonely Lines to Read Between

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to Tro for holding my hand as I flailed in panic about this one. C:

He learns what it is to be a man in the books his fathers leaves open in the study; books on science and history and names in lists that repeat endlessly and grow by numbers, adding into a definition and a whole that he keeps buzzing under his skin.

He learns cruelty from the girls in his class, who snicker behind their hands and stare and point, and the boys who watch him from the sidelines, never quite knowing what to make of him as they mutter when he's not looking about the weird kid who reads too much and comes to class with dirty knees and kinked clothes from playing in the washed out morning dawn, out of place in the world of pressed uniforms and expensive tutors.

He learns isolation in the still corners of his ancient home and the quiet pools that pepper the frivolous land, and in the silence that breaks like scattered storm clouds, rare and precious for the growth it brings.

"Our little tomboy," his mother says, with her distant smile, too tall for him to see the look in her eyes and her presence too scarce for him to make it up in his mind; a perpetual blank spot swirling in his memories. Her hand is on his head, and the tips of her fingers are cold where they touch his scalp.

He learns compassion from strangers and friendship in the girl who comes from outside the city and doesn't know a thing about him that he hasn't told her himself.

"Shouko," Marina murmurs, pasting a band-aid over his knee from where he slipped and fell, skidding over the gravel. "You're too clumsy. Don't you know? A woman is supposed to be graceful."

"I'm not a woman," he says and she smiles at him.

"You will be."

And inside he shudders with nameless fear.

He grows breasts in the ninth grade, when before they were tiny little lumpy things that he poked and joked were there because he was getting fat.

And the thing is, no one ever really told him what it meant to divide yourself into two, that there was a path he was headed down without any way to change direction or to find a way off the tracks. But he's growing up and out and there's nothing he can do to change how he goes soft while the other boys voices drop like buzzing bees and bodies roar up around him into towered fortresses that he can't imitate away.

So he hides himself in the city, in her secret spaces, and lives his life through those people written across pages, telling him silent lies and easy truths and teach him how to separate himself into little pieces that are easier to cover up and put away and change the shape of until he can be everything he wants to be if he just shouts it loudly enough, brash and stunning in its simplicity.

Marina kisses him soon after he starts changing, puts her fingers against his chest and puts her little mouth over his, sweet and delicate and feather-light.

"It was just a phase," she tells him later, smiling, small and apologetic. "I don't think I'm attracted to girls like that."

And he's not a woman, but now he's a girl, and the person she wants him to be doesn't make any sense.

They grow away after that, drifting apart like a summer cloud and he's sullen and teenaged and angry when he gets in his first scuff with the bigger kids that style themselves gangsters in miniature.

But at the end of the day he's larger in his head than he is in life, stronger, faster, more _right_ , and they break his skin and his pride and bleed it out into the dirt, again and again, when he puts his nose where it doesn't belong.

His head is down and his mouth is tight the first time Jinno brings him in to the headquarters with a bloody lip and bruised knuckles.

"State you name for the records," he says.

"Hidari Shou--" he says, and the rest of his name sticks in his throat, lodged tight, but Jinno just nods and mutters it to himself as he writes it down.

He doesn't bother to tell him his parents won't come flying in when he picks up the phone to have them come and whisk him home. They're too busy, his father is in America and his mother has been in meetings for weeks, preparing for a client that could net their company a contract too sweet to lose. He stares out the barred window sullenly, chin on his aching hand as Jinno puts the still ringing phone back on the cradle with a confused look in his eyes.

He finally takes him home when the sun sinks below the horizon, hand tight on his shoulder as they reach his front door.

“Just, stay out of trouble, alright kid?”

And it's frustrating when he sits himself in front of the mirror and looks at himself, because he's not made of sharp lines and chiseled jaws and a rough patch of stubble and the suits he finds hang wrong on his frame and the tailor laughs when he presents them and tries to direct him to the dresses. 

He leaves with words loud and angry and defensive on his tongue and wears those suits anyways, like an ill-fitting second skin, memories swirling through his head and mixing in the bright cloud of fantasy and longing that he lives and breathes through.

It's a frustrating itch in the back of his throat, because he can see it before him, everything he wants to be sitting at fingertips that never grew quite long enough to reach.

When it happens, it's in the middle of an abandoned factory, one that he's known almost since he could leave the house without a caretaker hovering at his side; knows it as well as the scent of beer that the kids bring here, littering it with their drunken laughter and stolen moments of life. Excitement beats through him like a drug in time to the quiet murmur of voices, hissing in argument, and beneath it all the soft, muffled sound of someone gagged, because he's found it. He's found what he was looking for.

He's found a chance.

He creeps around the back, low to the ground, ducking behind old and crumbled pieces of wall. Their captive sees him, eyes going wide, and he puts a silent finger to his lips, pinky out, heavy with the weight of his ring.

They find him when he's at his back, hands busy at knots around his wrists, caught with his head down and his back hunched as he works.

He's grabbed around the waist, brought up into the air, kicking uselessly and yowling in a cracking voice.

They hit him in the gut, and leave bruises like brands, but it's not like he hasn't been there before and at least he's not alone when they tie his arms behind his back and throw him into the dirt.

The guy is looking at him over his glasses like he's insane when he manages to wriggle himself into a sitting position, panting around the bulk of his own gag.

It's only then that it slots in his head that this isn't what he thought it was, isn't what he's used to, because the bullies in the school yard don't keep the guns he can see glinting on the table between him and the men he mistook for boys.

The cold press of metal to his forehead isn't something he ever forgets, nor is the the sweat that beads down between the fabric of the sports bra that's two sizes too small and sometimes leaves his vision blurry when he stands too fast. He wonders hysterically if they'll find it on his corpse before they leave him to rot.

In the end it's a dream that saves him, saves them both, snapping before him like a white wall, stretching over head, always forcing him to look up.

“I think I've let this go on long enough,” his memory says, layered over the mirror image from that day all those years ago when he sat in a bar too old for him, he and Marina pretending for that one simple moment that they could be the same.

His hands are rough on his wrists when the thugs have dropped into so much crumpled paper, barking orders in a voice like coarse music. The gag is taken off of him when it's clear he won't take it off himself, a jaw like iron clenching in silent impatience, the scent of stinging cologne clinging to him.

“You're too young to have a death wish, and too old to be brave,” he says, looking down at him when he's pulled him to his feet by an unyielding grip on his arm.

"Boy," he says. "What's your name?"

And he looks up at him with wide eyes, adrenaline and fear and the desperate hope of longing still running beneath the foreign skin of his chest and it seems like the warehouse settles into a moment of held breath before the answer comes out of him like something opening in him, spit out like a challenge.

"Shoutarou. I'm Hidari Shoutarou."


End file.
